What’s coming up at #IROS2025?

by Lucy Smith

15 October 2025

Plenary talks

There are three plenary talks on the programme this year, with one per day on Tuesday 21, Wednesday 22, and Thursday 23 October.

Marco Hutter – The New Era of Mobility: Humanoids and Quadrupeds Enter the Real World
Hyoun Jin Kim – Autonomous Aerial Manipulation: Toward Physically Intelligent Robots in Flight
Song-Chun Zhu – TongBrain: Bridging Physical Robots and AGI Agents

Keynote talks

The keynotes this year fall under eleven umbrella topics:

Rehabilitation & Physically Assistive Systems
- Patrick Wensing – From Controlled Tests to Open Worlds: Advancing Legged Robots and Lower-Limb Prostheses
- Hao Su – AI-Powered Wearable and Surgical Robots for Human Augmentation
- Lorenzo Masia – Wearable Robots and AI for Rehabilitation and Human Augmentation
- Shingo Shimoda – Science of Awareness: Toward a New Paradigm for Brain-Generated Disorders
Bio-inspired Robotics
- Kevin Chen – Agile and robust micro-aerial-robots driven by soft artificial muscles
- Josie Hughes – Bioinspired Robots: Building Embodied Intelligence
- Jee-Hwan Ryu – Soft Growing Robots: From Disaster Response to Colonoscopy
- Lei Ren – Layagrity robotics: inspiration from the human musculoskeletal system
Soft Robotics
- Bram Vanderborght – Self healing materials for sustainable soft robots”
- Cecilia Laschi – From AI Scaling to Embodied Control: Toward Energy-Frugal Soft Robotics
- Kyu-Jin Cho – Soft Wearable Robots: Navigating the Challenges of Building Technology for the Human Body
- Li Wen – Multimodal Soft Robots: Elevating Interaction in Complex and Diverse Environments
Al and Robot Learning
- Fei Miao – From Uncertainty to Action: Robust and Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Embodied AI
- Xifeng Yan – Adaptive Inference in Transformers
- Long Cheng – Learning from Demonstrations by the Dynamical System Approach
- Karinne Ramírez-Amaro – Transparent Robot Decision-Making with Interpretable & Explainable Methods
Perception and Sensors
- Davide Scaramuzza – Low-latency Robotics with Event Cameras
- Kris Dorsey – Sensor design for soft robotic proprioception
- Perla Maiolino – Shaping Intelligence: Soft Bodies, Sensors, and Experience
- Roberto Calandra – Digitizing Touch and its Importance in Robotics
Human Robot Interaction
- Javier Alonso-Mora – Multi-Agent Autonomy: from Interaction-Aware Navigation to Coordinated Mobile Manipulation
- Jing Xiao – Robotic Manipulation in Unknown and Uncertain Environments
- Dongheui Lee – From Passive Learner to Pro-Active and Inter-Active Learner with Reasoning Capabilities
- Ya-Jun Pan – Intelligent Adaptive Robot Interacting with Unknown Environment and Human
Embodied Intelligence
- Fumiya Iida – Informatizing Soft Robots for Super Embodied Intelligence
- Nidhi Seethapathi – Predictive Principles of Locomotion
- Cewu Lu – Digital Gene: An Analytical Universal Embodied Manipulation Ideology
- Long Cheng – Learning from Demonstrations by the Dynamical System Approach
Medical Robots
- Kenji Suzuki – Small-data Deep Learning for AI Doctor and Smart Medical Imaging
- Li Zhang – Magnetic Microrobots for Translational Biomedicine: From Individual and Modular Designs to Microswarms
- Kanako Harada – Co-evolution of Human and AI-Robots to Expand Science Frontiers
- Loredana Zollo – Towards Synergistic Human–Machine Interaction in Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics: Multimodal Interfaces, Sensory Feedback, and Future Perspectives
Field Robotics
- Matteo Matteucci – Robotics Meets Agriculture: SLAM and Perception for Crop Monitoring and Precision Farming
- Brendan Englot – Situational Awareness and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty for Marine Robots
- Abhinav Valada – Open World Embodied Intelligence: Learning from Perception to Action in the Wild
- Timothy H. Chung – Catalyzing the Future of Human, Robot, and AI Agent Teams in the Physical World
Humanoid Robot Systems
- Kei Okada – Transforming Humanoid Robot Intelligence: From Reconfigurable Hardware to Human-Centric Applications
- Xingxing Wang – A New Era of Global Collaboration in Intelligent Robotics
- Wei Zhang – Towards Physical Intelligence in Humanoid Robotics
- Dennis Hong – Staging the Machine: Not Built for Work, Built for Wonder
Mechanisms and Controls
- Kenjiro Tadakuma – Topological Robotic Mechanisms
- Angela P. Schoellig – AI-Powered Robotics: From Semantic Understanding to Safe Autonomy
- Lu Liu – Safety-Aware Multi-Agent Self-Deployment: Integrating Cybersecurity and Constrained Coordination
- Fuchun Sun – Knowledge-Guided Tactile VLA: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with Physics and Geometry Awareness

Debate

On Wednesday, a debate will be held on the following topic: “Humanoids Will Soon Replace Most Human Workers: True or False?” The participants will be: XingXing Wang (Unitree Robotics), Jun-Oh Ho (Samsung and Rainbow Robotics), Hong Qiao (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Andra Keay, (Silicon Valley Robotics), Yu Sun (EiC, IEEE Trans on Automation Science and Engineering), Tamim Asfour (Professor of Humanoid Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley, Moderator).